obtain a
knowledge of its character and powers, see its huge spots, its quivering
fringe of flame, and high-leaping prominences, or watch its slowly
revolving form.

Thus we see the planets that around it sweep and roll; swift-footed
Mercury with his wondrous speed, and dazzling Venus with her silver
sheen; Mars the god of war with his ruddy glow, and mighty Jupiter with
his orange hue, and the yellow Saturn with her mysterious rings, the
blue Uranus, and the more distant Neptune, with all the satellites that
to it belong.

Then far far away the brilliant Sirius--the Dog Star, Cygnet, Centauri,
the Great Bear, and a thousand others.

The Pleiades and the twenty millions of suns that form our own galaxy
and the Milky Way, with all their varied colours, tints, and hues of
white, golden, orange, ruby, red and blue, green and grey, silver,
purple and yellow, buff and fawn, emerald and green, lilac and coppery.
Thus we see the distant Orion, so far away that swift-footed Light, with
its speed of more than eleven million miles per minute, has to travel
for more than thirty thousand years before it spans the gulf that
intervenes between it and us, and brings to us the news of its existence
there.

Then the spectroscope with its revealing power literally tears asunder
wave from wave, and reveals the mystic message which each doth bear, of
the distant things from which they come, of each and every sort and
kind.

Thus we know, that in the solar fires there ever burn such things as
hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, and also, in a vaporous state, aluminium,
sodium, iron, magnesium, cobalt, calcium, chromium, copper, manganese,
zinc, and others.

Thus light-waves are speeding everywhere, and from all material things.
They come from our own sun, and rush in, and flood the earth's aerial
veil, the atmosphere; and "Each little atom of matter, like a mirror,
reflects and re-reflects them as if in sport, buffeting each luminous
ray from one to another, increasing and amplifying it by an infinity of
repercussions" (Herschel), and then in their entirety and whole, like a
huge multi-mirror, so blend and mingle them that they come to earth's
surface in that soft radiance we call Light, and bathe it as in a sea
of mellowed glory.

ART. 50. _Aether: its Motions._--The question of the exact motions of
the Aether is a question which has involved the attention of scientific
men for many years, and which is at the present time receiving